Pioneer Journey – up, up and more up

DAY FIVE – Stage 4: 68.9km, 2519m climbing

I should mention that each night we get a race briefing for the stage to come in the morning. The briefing the night before for today’s stage was not an enjoyable one. After believing the worst was over with on stage 2, we got told stage 4 is going to be worst. With more climbing packed into over 30km less distance. Well actually even less as all the climbing was finished by the 53km mark. Not only did that information make the briefing bad but we also got told that the extra mandatory gear was required as we were going to a higher altitude. This meant instead of only having to carry a light rain jacket, a merino head warmer, spares and a med kit, we now had to carry a more serious rain jacket, merino tights and a merino base layer. So, on the day with the most climbing we had to carry the most amount of gear. There were many sighs in the crowd.

Our biggest day of climbing, with 2500m of climbing to do which was all completed by the 53km point. This was the stage everyone feared. You could sense the nervousness of people not knowing what to expect or how they are feeling. We quickly started a small climb of about 300m climbing where Rohan and I lost contact with our group, but we knew that there was not point riding hard to stay with the group early on as there were some monster climbs to come. We rolled through some undulating terrain before we hit our first big test, a 10km climb that ascended 1000 metres. I begun today’s stage feeling absolutely crap, I was finding the pace hard even in the 2km neutral section, so I thought I was in for the worst day of my life. Once we began climbing though, something clicked inside me and I started feeling the best I have felt all week. Rohan and I were passing and dropping teams left and right. Our plan to hold back early on worked perfectly! After cresting the top of the first big hill we descended for a bit before our last climb of the day, Mount Difficulty. The name wasn’t too confidence inspiring. As per the last climb Rohan and I just found our tempo and picked off teams moving up places. After about 4km of climbing, looking at the barely readable profile stickers given to us, Rohan and I thought we had a short flat section which we could see before we climbed what looked like a wall to the top of Mt Difficulty. Obviously, our eyes were deceiving us but in a good way as we turned right instead of left which was to go further up and we begun our descent. This isn’t to say the climb was easy, I was glad the climbing was over earlier than expected as I didn’t know how much longer I could go for.

Displaying some serious pain face as we get close to the peak of Mt Difficulty. Photo credit: Tim Bardsley-Smith

Shortly after we began descending, we wished we were climbing again as the descent was the most rough and steep trail we had ever ridden. Constantly on the brakes, getting bounced around everywhere on our hardtail mountain bikes, we were not enjoying this descent one bit. Finally, we made it to the aid station at the bottom. Stopping to grab some food and complain about what we had just come down we quickly left with another team to ride the last 10km together sharing the work. This was a perfect situation for us as we still go to go fast but we had more time to rest off the front as there were now two more people to ride on the front for us. The last 10km flew by and we were turning into the race village before we knew it and unknowingly rode to our best result yet with 15^th overall. We were quite pleased with that and rather loudly celebrated our achievement. This put us into 21^st on GC bringing back our hopes of a top 20 GC result.